=New Demands for Social Control of Marriage Choices.=--Social wisdom obliges more deliberation in the case of young people seeking a marriage license on their own initiative and perhaps after a very brief acquaintance. There is a strong demand that a certain period shall elapse between the request for the license and its granting and that sufficient publicity be secured to make it easy for interested parties to ascertain any facts concerning both the man and the woman involved, which might make the marriage either illegal, as bigamy, or a catastrophe, as uniting one unfit for marriage with an unsuspecting person blinded by sudden attraction. More than this, many States of our Union are beginning processes of law to require certificates of physical fitness, of freedom from infectious or dangerous disease, and some statement of facts as to previous obedience to law and ability for self-support such as alone would make marriage successful. Ministers of religion of various sects are taking more and more a stand against marriage of persons whom they know are of bad habits or otherwise likely to give a married partner an unhappy life. Insanity in the family is now considered in some States a disqualification for marriage, and statutes requiring some family testimony to facts concerning that inheritance are coming into enactment and enforcement. The tragedy of marrying ignorantly into a certain and hopeless fate of union with one who can never be of sound mind is so terrible that the state itself is trying to safeguard carelessness on that point. The medical profession is more and more acting a parental part in requiring the registry of diseases that are most unsocial in their effect--diseases incident to vice, and which make any man while suffering from them unfit for marriage. It is proposed by many, and by law required in some States, that no marriage license shall be given without a certificate of both mental and physical fitness, to be handed to the officer before registry of the application, in order that there may be no public refusal on such grounds of unfitness after it is known that a license to marry has been sought. This would be far better than, as has been proposed by some persons, for clergymen to take the initiative in requiring such physical and mental tests after a request to marry two people and after a license has been secured. After a matter has gone so far as to result in a request to a clergyman to officiate at the marriage ceremony, the exaction of an examination which the state has not previously required would inevitably, as has been already shown in some instances, lead to suspicion and bad feeling. The duty of the state, which alone in our country gives power to marry (the clergyman performing the ceremony pronouncing the couple married "by virtue of the power invested in him by the state"), is clear. That duty is to take all initiative in all previous inquiries aimed at preventing the marriage of unfit persons.